noises from dog n’ moon.

Every now and then, we get hired to design something that involves multiple comps that are refined, rejected, and renewed until one is chosen and everyone lives happily aver after. Other times we get hired to design something and the client goes in a different direction than we’d hoped. This particular instance is neither of those.

For Eldorado Recording Studios (Burbank, CA) we were asked to update the brand and rebuild the site to signify new growth, new life, and to commemorate the new Great Park that is under construction right in its back yard. The guidelines were simple: respect the fact that they’ve been around for almost 60 years, have turned out some of the most respected recordings of all time, have a rich heritage in the Recording Industry, and are one of the last of the full-service, working high-end recording studios on the West Coast. Oh yeah, and “don’t make it look like we only record Country Music”.

This particular idea achieved all of the goals, except for maybe the last one. With a name like Eldorado, it’s hard not to mentally venture South of the Border or think of Cities of Gold. But we enjoyed making this one (*and then seeing it get rejected unceremoniously…*) and we feel that when the right time comes, we’ll put it on the chest of a hundred thousand t-shirts and make meeelions of dollars (he said with his pinky to his mouth).

Stay tuned for the launch of the new site with the actual updated Eldorado Recording Studios brand.

I was able to spend last week at the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) Show in Anaheim, CA with Taylor Guitars. To give you a quick rundown, NAMM is an industry-only trade show held twice a year, but the Winter show is the big kahuna of them all. This is the place where manufacturers of all things musical launch their new products for the year- and they pull out all of the stops. My first year there, I saw my favorite guitar player idol (John Jorgenson), the actor Keanu Reeves, and the awkwardly captivating Elvira all in the span of 90 seconds. Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to put their trade show booth into place and nothing is too excessive or over the top.

I started working as a freelance contract employee with Taylor about a year ago. Their marketing department hired me to help support the launch of a new guitar line at the show, and that relationship continued with monthly trips around the nation on what they call The Taylor Road Show, which is a national tour of in-store events where consumers are able to interact with the guitars, the manufacturers, and professional musicians in a casual atmosphere. It’s rare that a company would send out it’s employees, professional musicians as demo clinicians, and the most elite of its expensive items all for the sole purpose of letting end-users and consumers interact with them in a tactile way. Case in point, there is a section of each Road Show date set aside as the “Petting Zoo”, where customers are encouraged to play $10k custom one-off guitars. What company would do that? In addition to footing the bill to send employees, rare guitars, and preemptive local Road Show advertising to many of their US and Canadian dealers, they also invite other manufacturing teams to the plant for behind-the-velvet-rope tours to see how they turn a tree into an award-winning guitar. Not only do they invite the competition to come see manufacturing, but they’ll invite manufacturers from other fields (like the Automotive Industry) to view the workflow and production methods.

Having spent a little bit of time down at Taylor Guitars (located in El Cajon, a suburb of San Diego) with the marketing department, I was able to ask why an industry leader would be so open with their ideas. Conventional thinking says, “If we have an idea that is unique, we should hold on to it so that consumers know who the pioneers are and where to find that which they can’t find elsewhere.”

The response from Taylor’s Director of Product Development, David Hosler, has changed the way I view marketing. He responded by saying that Production is a very little part of the game. Anyone can produce anything. “By the time we show a product at NAMM, other companies have already duplicated it in hopes of riding the wave of success”, he said. So showing people the production process is not giving away anything that they can’t figure out on their own. No, real success comes from two other things. 1.) Success is Personality Driven, not Program Driven. 2.) You can never rule out the power of Creativity. Anyone can manufacture anything, but the company that continually brings something unique to the market is ultimately going to see success. And a company is able to bring something unique to the market when the role players in that company share a vibrant, engaging, creative, and passionate personality.

So what does this mean to you and your business venture? Content is King, and Creativity is his Queen. If you’re thinking that you have the “Super Product” that will pull the public away from their TiVOs long enough to rush out and buy one, then you may be in for a hard fall. If, however, you have any product at all, and you’re thinking that with some creative zigging, zagging, and tail-waving, you might be able to catch the public’s attention- now you might be on to something. Take it from the man who has had his hands in the development of the last 3 award-winning creations for Taylor Guitars, a company that does sales in the tens of millions each year: your creativity and your personality are ultimately more important than your product, because your creativity and personality ensure that a single successful product is not a fluke.

Perhaps it’s time to hire someone to share in the creative process and create your personality-driven campaign or product launch?

About a year ago, we were contacted by a group who wanted to launch a coffee venture. Being addicts ourselves, of course we jumped at the chance.

The initial pitch was that the coffee venture would act as a retail front for global social change. The principals were all professional church workers, but were hoping that this would act as more of a generic move for global change instead of a fancy public relations move for their respective churches. It was doing good for the right reasons instead of doing good to strengthen the individual congregations. Originally, the product was named Impact Coffee. They had a name, a tagline “Do You Have One”, and a graphic that showed a water droplet making a circular wake in otherwise still waters. Immediately we went to work trying to fulfill the need of creating a Corporate Identity. One of the first roadblocks we encountered was the fact that Impact is a fairly common name for coffee products. Small, independently owned coffee shops across the nation are called Impact and the name was even registered for a coffee distributor in the Northwest. Time for a plan B.

While working through the ideas, we tried to concentrate on the mission of the coffee. To be honest, a retail coffee shop, distributor, or roaster being used as a means of public awareness and social change is not a unique concept. Behind petroleum, coffee is the world’s second most traded commodity and with the popularity of Starbucks, many have taken notice of coffee’s penchant for being woven into the day-to-day tapestry of American behavior. So, in short, we weren’t going to be first or second to market with this idea. We wouldn’t even be 30th to market. But when you’re talking about improving social conditions, it’s okay to copy the idea, as long as the end result is more people affected by positive change. So what do you do when you’re 31st to market on an idea but you still want to be considered as a legitimate venture? Strengthen the presentation. For a story to be successful, both the content and the delivery have to be great. Hollywood has proven that even a less-than-unique story can see success if the presentation of that story is eye-catching. So we set our sights on strengthening the presentation.

The first step was to rename the venture with something more complex than “Impact”. Not only does the word “impact” have a harsh and abrupt ending with the letter “t”, but the definition of the word points to a singular and fixed moment in time. Once an impact is over, there’s nothing left to see. We wanted a word that not only carried on audibly, but pointed to a process more than an event. After doing some research, we found that the english words “amend” (where we get “amendment”), and “emend” come from the latin word “emendare” which means “to go back and make right”. Originally, we were pronouncing it Ah-men-DARE, but the scholarly Latin pronunciation is AY-mun-DAR-ay. It was less perfect because it added a 4th syllable and dropped the implication of the phrase “Men Dare”, as in “Brave men dare to do great things”, but it was still a good fit and a strong improvement over the original title.

We pitched a few visual ideas, but settled on a coffee cup that had a gentle and subtle arrow created from one of the lines. Not only does the arrow imply a counter-clockwise movement and flow from right to left, but the cup itself shows the handle on the left side, which would seem awkward to those who are right handed (no offense, lefties). The whole concept was to show the product, state the mission, and explain the name all in one brand mark.

This past weekend, we finished the in-store signage for the retail shop and we’re pretty proud to have been part of something that will be of benefit to the community.So what can we learn from this process?

1. One must be careful when choosing a name. It’s easy to go to one of two extremes: too much concentration or not enough thought. After having named three of my own children and one business, I understand the stress that goes into trying to see 15 years down the road to see if the name still stands up after so much time has passed. I also understand that each of us has baggage about names, whether it be for our children or our business ventures. But find some peace in Act II of Romeo and Juliet where Shakespeare writes, “…what’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet”. Spend enough time on your name to make sure that it’s not already taken, forgettable, or inappropriate. But keep in mind that your product is the smell of your rose. Labeling it flower or cheese is just to give people a way to find it again after they’ve enjoyed it once.

2. If your product isn’t unique, you must focus your efforts on your presentation of the product. Don’t forget, the iPod was NOT the first mp3 player on the market. Actually, it wasn’t even the second or third. But it was the one that was presented to the public as a lifestyle product and the gateway to cool.

3. Be prepared to take calculated risks. MANY businesses fail for a number of reasons- some foreseeable, others out of the hands of the principals. But the one thing that ties successful ventures together is that the drivers of the project took calculated risks on an idea, a market, a marketing strategy, or a business practice that might otherwise seem ludicrous on paper.

And now, I’m taking my ideas with me and heading out for a cup of coffee.

Every now and again, we see an advertising campaign that sticks with us. Which isn’t necessarily an endorsement of the caliber of its genius, it’s just the barometer of how different it is.The first of such cases is this campaign for the tv show, Desperate Housewives. The responsible advertising agency chose to print rubberized dummy stripes for parking lots at a boutique (read: expensive) grocery store here in Southern California. It reads, “This Parking for Desperate Housewives Only“. It’s an interesting way to help your market identify with the product. In a sense, it blurs the lines between who is the actual Desperate Housewife- the few who are paid millions to play them on television, or the many who are shopping for the family dinner at a local supermarket.
  

The second idea is one that is more bizarre than clever. But in advertising, the bizarre often gives birth to the successful. Once that happens, the bizarre idea is then relabeled as clever, as if it had been all along…  It’s complicated but part of the fun of playing the advertising game. It’s like gambling on the public’s tastes. So this particular campaign could be spotted on a sunny day in mid-December on Katella Blvd. (Disneyland’s front sidewalk). But you had to look quickly because it was five moped scooters, driven by five similarly dressed individuals, all with the same body type, posture, and driving skills, and all on the move at quite a clip. To be honest, I’ve never felt more like I was in the middle of a YouTube video than when the adver-parade passed me. So I did what any right-minded marketing person would do, I pulled out my trusty iPhone, dangerously fumbled with the buttons and tried to collect proof that I wasn’t going crazy or seeing quintuple. (Note to self: time to get the SUV’s dusty dashboard detailed…)
 

So what’s a business owner to think about these two types of unconventional advertising? Well, I think they’re a sign of things to come, in that the media is infiltrating our lives in more and more creative ways. Do people read magazines anymore? I know that I commonly Tivo shows for the sole purpose of being able to fast forward through the commercials. Classic advertising channels like magazine ads and commercials are a little less effective and therefore new advertising channels have to be explored. My parking space? My drive to the printer? These are just a couple of the new places that I’m being sold on new products. Having said that, the business owner must keep in mind that he or she needs to be prepared to explore the unconventional and the bizarre if he or she wants to compete in the marketplace. Additionally, more and more latitude must be given to the agencies to deliver on the promise of unique advertising and marketing. Designers and advertisers need to be a little left of center to be good at what they do anyway, why not utilize that commodity for your next successful campaign?